While there hasn’t been much in the way of new Linux game ports from Feral Interactive since Steam Play (Valve’s Proton + VKD3D-Proton) took over the scene, they do continue maintaining their GameMode open-source service and today released GameMode 1.8 with work by them and the open-source community…

Source: Phoronix – Feral’s GameMode 1.8 Adds CPU Core Pinning & Parking

Cloudflare has talked up their success in using the open-source Linux-based OpenBMC software for baseboard management controllers (BMCs) as a replacement to proprietary BMC software stacks…

Source: Phoronix – Cloudflare Talks Up Its Success In Using OpenBMC

Fedora 40 is eyeing the next phase of its unified kernel (UKI) support within the distribution that will include the ability to support booting to unified kernel image files directly without having to go through a traditional bootloader like GRUB or SD-Boot…

Source: Phoronix – Fedora 40 Eyes The Ability To Boot Unified Kernel Images Directly

While Blender is at the forefront of receiving corporate sponsorships and funding for advancing that open-source 3D modeling software, other free software graphics programs haven’t all received the same level of support. As good news for further raising the open-source creative/graphics ecosystem, an Austrian video game studio has become one of the new Krita sponsors…

Source: Phoronix – Austrian Game Studio Now Sponsoring Krita Development

As noted in late November, AMD has begun enabling new “GFX12” hardware in LLVM for their AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end. GFX12 is the target for next-generation RDNA4 graphics processors and that upstreaming effort has continued with more patches being upstreamed…

Source: Phoronix – More AMD GFX12 Additions Land In LLVM Git For RDNA4 GPUs

AlmaLinux’s ELevate software is a wonderful utility to help ease migration between existing major versions of RHEL derivatives. In particular, it’s been very useful for moving past CentOS 7 and/or upgrading from AlmaLinux 8 to 9, along with the ability to even move to other RHEL derivatives…

Source: Phoronix – AlmaLinux’s ELevate Begins Handling EPEL Repositories

SQLite as the leading open-source embedded database solution has landed JSONB, a rewrite of the SQLite JSON functions that can be up to “several times faster” than the existing JSON functions…

Source: Phoronix – SQLite Lands JSONB For Much Faster JSON Functions

The openSUSE project has been working on a rebranding to better differentiate between this community open-source project and SUSE itself. There’s been work on a logo design contest with just under one week left to vote in this survey…

Source: Phoronix – One Week Left To Vote On openSUSE’s New Logo

The Steam Deck OLED has been on the test bench the past few weeks at Phoronix. The HDR OLED display of the updated Steam Deck handheld game console is gorgeous and was very impressed by it. On a technical level the battery life improvements are significant and one of the items I was most curious about were the power/performance implications in moving from the 7nm Van Gogh APU to a 6nm die shrink version of it while retaining the Zen 2 CPU cores and RDNA2 integrated graphics. Here’s a look at the performance and CPU power consumption between the Steam Deck LCD and Steam Deck OLED models not only for gaming but other Linux workloads too.

Source: Phoronix – The Performance & Power Improvement Of Steam Deck OLED’s 6nm APU

Following the SLOB allocator removal earlier this year, the Linux 6.8 kernel in the new year is now positioned to remove the SLAB allocator. Additionally, the lone good-for-everything SLUB allocator is set to receive further optimizations…

Source: Phoronix – Linux 6.8 To Drop The SLAB Allocator, SLUB Optimizations Coming Too

GNOME Shell has merged a set of 35 patches to fix/improve icon and text scaling support, especially when using the Large Text mode for accessibility…

Source: Phoronix – GNOME Shell Lands Improved Icon & Text Scaling

Here are some benchmarks looking at the performance uplift in migrating from Fedora Workstation 38 to Fedora Workstation 39 on an AMD Ryzen 7040 “Phoenix” series laptop…

Source: Phoronix – Fedora Workstation 39 Delivers Some Nice Gains For AMD Ryzen 7040 Series Graphics

The AI Alliance has launched as a consortium focused on advancing open, safe, and responsible AI…

Source: Phoronix – Intel, AMD, Red Hat / IBM, Meta & Others Launch The AI Alliance

TornadoVM 1.0 has been released as the open-source software providing an OpenJDK and GraalVM plug-in for allowing Java on heterogeneous hardware from multi-core CPUs to GPUs and FPGAs. TornadoVM allows targeting OpenCL, NVIDIA PTX, and SPIR-V devices for a rather robust array of hardware support…

Source: Phoronix – TornadoVM 1.0 Released For Running Java On Heterogeneous Hardware: CPUs, GPUs & FPGAs

Published originally back in October were a set of patches for allowing different compression algorithms for the Linux hibernation image to yield faster restore times. That work — focused on LZ4 compression support — has been revised as it works toward the mainline kernel…

Source: Phoronix – LZ4 Support Revised For Faster Restore From Linux Hibernation

Intel’s CPU temperature driver “coretemp” within the Linux kernel is being adapted so it can report CPU core temperatures in excess of 128 cores…

Source: Phoronix – Intel’s Linux CPU Temperature Driver Being Adapted To Handle 128+ CPU Cores

If the likes of the Steam Deck or ASUS ROG Ally are out of your budget or you just prefer enjoying more classic, less demanding games, there are Linux kernel patches being floated to allow mainline support for a sub-$200 ARM-powered handheld gaming console…

Source: Phoronix – Mainline Linux Support Is Being Worked On For A 0~200 ARM Handheld Gaming Console

Being worked on recently by Boris Brezillon at Collabora is Panthor, a new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver for supporting the newer Arm Mali graphics processors…

Source: Phoronix – “Panthor” DRM Driver Coming Together For Newer Arm Mali GPUs

Flowblade 2.12 is now available as this multi-track, non-linear video editor for Linux systems. Shotcut as another open-source video editor also recently put out a new version too…

Source: Phoronix – Flowblade 2.12 Video Editor Brings Faster Proxy Rendering, Continued GTK4 Porting

One of the latest Linux kernel patch series posted by AMD Linux engineers is for enabling an AMD QoS RMID pinning feature found within their latest generation processors…

Source: Phoronix – AMD Posts Linux Patches For QoS RMID Pinning / ABMC